A family of Jews were showing their tickets at the head of the gangplank. All Jews wanted to go to America, in Grigori’s experience. They had even more reason than he did. In Russia there were laws forbidding them to own land, to enter the civil service, to be army officers, and countless other prohibitions. They could not live where they liked, and there were quotas limiting the number who could go to universities. It was a miracle any of them made a living.
Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.
Repress those who complain, rather than address their discontents.
If God could not forgive lascivious priests, there would be very few clergy in heaven.
I could weep for all the innocent women and children who were burned and maimed in London – and it doesn’t help at all to know that German women and children are suffering the same.
When Ethel said we should give everyone free education and free health care and unemployment insurance, I told her she was living in a dream world. But now look: everything she campaigned for has come to pass, and yet England is still England.
In the old days you wouldn’t discuss politics at all.” “If you don’t take an interest, then what happens is your fault.
We’ll see, Grigori thought as he drifted off to sleep. Brave words came easily in the dark. Daylight might tell a different story.
There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.
For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.
Women wanted a new deal, and they expected him to know, without being told, what the deal was, and to agree to it without negotiation.
International politics is like a glass. Aggressive moves by either side pour water in. The overflow is war.” Dimka.
Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.
So much hangs on the decisions of a small number of poorly educated people.” “That’s democracy.” Gus smiled. “A terrible way to run a country, but every other system is worse.
The fourth issue would go to the printer tomorrow. He was not so happy with this one: there was no big controversy. He put that out of his mind for the moment and.
Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice;.
All the same he was depressed and bitter. Life never dealt him a winning hand.
They all looked as Da came in from the street, wearing his meeting suit and a flat miner’s cap, perspiring from the walk up the hill. He took a step into the room, then stopped, staring. “Look who’s here,” Mam said.
The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunken battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.
But now he realized that, as a Jew, you could go anywhere in the world and always find someone to treat you like family.